In this excellent article by David Mathis from desiringgod.org we are reminded of the Person of the Holy Spirit and His involvement with our lives and the world.
Christ in Me? Three Wonders of Life in the Spirit - David Mathis
"Talk about the Holy Spirit? That’s always been tricky. After all, he is the Spirit, the Wind, the great unseen Enigma, that most mysterious and hidden Person of the ineffable Godhead.
Also, we live in times that can make thinking and speaking about the Spirit all the more difficult. For one, pervasive secular influences pressure us to deal with concrete phenomena — the seeable, hearable, touchable, tastable. The effect is a subtle but strong bias against the Spirit. With Jesus, we’re talking real-life humanity, at least in theory; with the church, we’re talking real-life fellow Christians; with creation, we’re talking tangible, sense-able, the world that surrounds us; with anthropology, flesh and blood and our own undeniable inner person. But the Invisible Wind is almost a no-starter for the mind shaped by secular influences.
What’s more, many Christians have the unfortunate tendency to quickly turn Spirit-talk to “manifestations of the Spirit” (1 Corinthians 14:12) — that is, spiritual gifts and especially controversial ones like speaking in tongues. All too soon, we are not even talking about the Spirit and the real heart of his work but mainly speculating about ourselves and telling strange stories.
In Scripture, the Spirit himself does not receive the front-and-center attention that the Father and the Son do. He often hides in compact, meaningful phrases and works quietly in the theological background. Of course, this is the Spirit’s own doing. He is the author of Scripture, thrilled to shine his light on Father and Son, to carry along prophets and apostles in word ministry, and to empower the words and deeds of the eternal Word himself. Scripture’s brevity of focus on the Spirit isn’t oversight or suppression. The Spirit likes it that way — he did it that way.
‘Life in the Spirit’
Still, hide and work quietly as he may, he does step forward in a place of striking prominence, in one of the greatest letters ever written, at the very climax of Paul’s magnum opus: “The Great Eight.”
Romans chapter 8 is one of the few spots where the Spirit pulls back the curtain and says, in effect, “I will tell you a little bit about myself: as much as you need to know, but not too much, and not for too long.” For centuries, devoted Christians have given special place to the promises and wonders of Romans 8, which is well summarized in the ESV with the heading “Life in the Spirit.” Romans 7:6 sets up the contrast that follows in the rest of chapter 7, and into chapter 8:
We serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.
Romans 7:7–24, then, rehearses the challenges of serving under the oldness of the previous era and its law (holy, righteous, and good as it was), and Romans 8:1–27 bursts into the joys and benefits of living in the newness of the Spirit. In Christ, the Spirit is not only with us, as he was with old-covenant saints, but now, poured out from heaven in new fullness by the risen Christ, the Spirit testifies to us of our status, intercedes for us in our weakness, and even dwells in us as the present, personal power of the Christian life. Consider these three Spirit-glories in Romans 8, working from the outside in..." from the article: Christ in Me? Three Wonders of Life in the Spirit - David Mathis
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